An anti-piracy alliance supported by many major US and UK movie studios, broadcasters and content providers has dealt a blow to the third-party Kodi add-on scene after it successfully forced a number of popular piracy-linked streaming tools offline. In what appears to be a coordinated crackdown, developers including jsergio123 and The_Alpha, who are responsible for the development and hosting of add-ons like urlresolver, metahandler, Bennu, DeathStreams and Sportie, confirmed that they will no longer maintain their Kodi creations and have immediately shut them down.
[...] The crackdown suggests the MPA/MPAA-led Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has a thorough understanding of how owners of so-called "Kodi boxes" are able to stream TV shows and films illegally. While Colossus merely hosts the tools, urlresolver and metahandler did much of the heavy lifting for streamers. Their job was to scrape video hosting sites for relevant streaming links and serve them up for tools like Covenant inside Kodi. Streamers will find it very difficult to find working video streams of their favorite content without them, but they could reappear via a new host in the future.
Source: Hollywood strikes back against illegal streaming Kodi add-ons
Additional info at TorrentFreak and TVAddons.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday November 20 2017, @09:15AM
I understand, but I'd need a really good antenna to pick up the shows, since I live in Europe. Moreover, downloading here is explicitly accepted (uploaded would be illegal), so leeching a torrent is fine.
The thing I just don't understand is: why doesn't the producer sell rights to the show. Put up their own download links, for a cheap-but-reasonable price, and they'd put the pirates out of business. For all of us outside this US, this is money they are not getting. There's zero loss to them, only gain, for actually selling their products.
As for your experience, I totally understand why you were surprised. As you say, they are teaching the wrong lessons: next time you want to download, you'll use a VPN.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.